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When is a book a book?

7 August 2013

On first consideration the answer seems obvious. But, given our electronic, digital age…

Launched tonight, Wednesday 7 August, the question of ‘when is a book a book?’ is seriously considered in two new, visually stunning and intellectually enthralling partner exhibitions developed by Macquarie University Art Gallery – ‘Unbound’ & ‘Bound’. The former is on display at the Gallery while the latter has fittingly utilised the exhibition space within the University Library.

Some 50 prominent and emerging visual artists from around the country were asked to contribute to the shows – including Mike Parr, Anne Zahalka, Euan Macleod, Stephen Birch and Juno Gemes.

The result is a dazzling array of aesthetic mediums, and interpretations that takes viewers on a journey into both the known and previously hidden qualities of ‘the book’.

According to curators Rhonda Davis and John Potts, ‘Unbound’ permits viewers to ‘experience the book as a space in which the artist has explored current issues exacting the immediate affects, responses and stories attached to a chosen condition’.

In particular for Davis, ‘the intrinsic qualities of the book allows artists a medium… [for] ideas, processes, accumulations and narratives in an open-ended way’. Potts considers that ‘Unbound’ ‘resonates with affiliations we have come to know about the book in anticipation of what it is and about to become − continually re-invented, re-interpreted and transformed by the artists hand – the book lives on’.

‘Bound’, curators, Kate Hargraves and Sara Smyth King, have created – in collaboration with the University’s Librarians – a beguiling insight into the Library’s rare book collections, contrasted to the evolving transformations of ‘the book’ generated by the popular growth of the eBook.

As Hargraves points out, ‘the old’ is certainly being confronted by ‘the new’: ‘University libraries hold astounding collections of rare books that often don’t see the light of day due to the fragility of the material… with the arrival of the digital book, rare books are becoming even rarer’. Smyth King also draws attention to the fact the ‘library spaces are no longer silenced entities but are permeated with the effervescent sounds of voices, eating, drinking and the constant rhythmic tap of key boards’.

Both exhibitions offer visitors windows into the relentless changes of how we now consider, view, relate and experience books and libraries within the context of both public and private reading. The written, visual, textual, monochrome, polychrome and imaginative world of the book is brought to life.

When is a book not a book? Possibly when we can no longer dream beyond what we know.

Dates:31 July – 7 September 2013

Official launch: 6pm on Wednesday 7 August, by Professor Robert Adamson

Venues: Macquarie University Art Gallery, Building E11A (northern end of Eastern Rd); Macquarie University Library (exhibition space), Building C3C (intersection of Macquarie Drive and Central Ave)